CNN and MSNBC will provide live coverage of the landing of NASA’s latest Mars mission — the space agency’s Polar Lander.

The lander will be searching for signs of life on the Red Planet’s south pole.

The lander is expected to touch down on the Martian surface at around 3 p.m. NASA scientists expect the first images from Mars to arrive around 4 p.m.

On CNN, coverage begins tomorrow morning with the news channel’s space correspondents, Miles O’Brien and John Zarrella, reporting from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the mission’s home base.

MSNBC plans to devote most of the day to the Mars lander, with correspondents reporting from Pasadena and coverage woven throughout the news channel’s normal programming.

Besides scientific equipment and cameras, the Polar Lander will be carrying a microphone that will send back sounds from Mars — if the lander successfully touches down.

The transmissions will take about 37 minutes to travel the 35 million miles from Mars’ South Pole to Earth.

This is the first attempt to land on Mars since 1997’s wildly successful Pathfinder, which sent back information for months longer than expected.

NASA botched its last Mars mission last September when human error caused the Polar Lander’s companion spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter to burn up in the Martian atmosphere.